Stylistic ingenuity can sometimes be a hindrance rather than a help, and such is the case with the way director Clare Lizzimore and designer Es Devlin have approached David Watson's elliptical play about contemporary violence. The bulk of the audience squats on cushions and swivels round to watch eight scenes that marry live action and film and are enacted on four separate stages behind gauze curtains. An idea that may have looked brilliant on the drawing board makes a demanding play even harder to follow.

Watson, who three years ago wrote the promising Flight Path about a dysfunctional family, shows how political killings provide a thread that links isolated individuals. Even if he does little to explain the source of either IRA or Islamist bombings, Watson has a gift for pinning down the private despair spurred by public actions. A bereaved Northern Irish police officer seeks to console an old woman for the loss of a grandson. A pregnant woman has an odd meeting in Regent's Park with a gay piano teacher after both have suffered the death of loved ones. These are striking scenes that suggest, in the manner of Simon Stephens's Pornography, that we live in a fragmented society where people are conjoined only by acts of violence.

It's an ingeniously wrought play that, moving back and forth over the events of a single summer and shifting between County Down, London and Birmingham, gives us touching snapshots of individual lives. Robin Soans is quietly moving as the solitary piano teacher hopelessly besotted by a Nigerian protege (Joseph Rowe). The brief encounter between Dearbhla Molloy as the old Irishwoman and Kevin McMonagle as the cop shows how shared grief can overcome the barriers of mutual suspicion. And the desperation of ex-lovers, still emotionally attached to each other, is well caught in the edgy confrontation of Sian Clifford as the young suburban mother and Adam Best as the nomadically restless Vincent.

Precisely because Watson's play is like a complex jigsaw whose pieces we gradually put together, it requires the simplest of productions. Instead, it gets relentlessly tricksy treatment that often obscures the action. Putting actors behind gauze curtains also muffles words: one crucial scene, between two discontented teenagers in a Birmingham cemetery, was especially hard to interpret. Watson has written a subtly troubling play about loneliness, loss and the perpetual threat of random violence; but I emerged muttering, like Gertrude to Polonius, "More matter with less art."